WileyFox Swift review

The 3rd Gen Moto G has been out for little over a month, but new British company WileyFox has already got a budget smartphone contender ready to steal Motorola's limelight. The Swift shares an almost identical specification to the £140 Moto G, including a 5in, 1,280x720 resolution display, 13-megapixel camera and a quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor, yet costs £129 - arguably making it better value.

Price isn't the only thing setting the Swift apart, though, as it also uses Cyanogen 12.1 rather than plain Android. Cyanogen looks and feels roughly the same as the vanilla version of Android Lollipop on the Moto G, but gains several handy features that make it a more practical and personal operating system.

Cyanogen & software features

Truecaller is built straight into the dialler, giving you caller ID and a spam filter to prevent pesky nuisance calls. Likewise, Privacy Guard gives you more control over your personal data, as you can select exactly which bits of information can be accessed by your apps rather than having to give permission for everything like you do in plain Android. It also tells you how frequently that app has requested a particular piece of information, which will no doubt be welcome news for those who like to keep their privacy settings under lock and key.

^ Cyanogen looks very similar to stock Android, but the app tray is ordered alphabetically in a list instead of a grid

Cyanogen is much more customisable than plain Android as well, as you not only have hundreds of different themes to choose from, but you can also personalise every last detail, from boot animations and wallpapers down to fonts and icon designs. Other non-Cyanogen phones, most notably HTC’s Sense 7-equipped handsets, let you to do this as well, but this is the first time this level of customisation has been available on a budget smartphone.

^ Privacy Guard lets you manage exactly what information can be accessed by your apps, while Cyanogen's extensive theme store lets you customise your handset right down to the fine details

Design

The Swift is beautifully designed, too, and I particularly like its soft-touch textured rear panel. This makes it feel a touch classier than the plastic Moto G, and its curved back sits very comfortably in the hand. It's a fraction thinner, too, measuring 9.4mm at its thickest point compared to the Moto G's 11.6mm.

Of course, its embossed logo and orange WileyFox branding on the rear isn't nearly as subtle as Motorola's circular dimple, but it's certainly more attractive than other phones I've tested at this price, including the Vodafone Smart Ultra 6.

Display

Despite similarities to the Moto G on paper, the Swift falls behind in a number of areas, including overall screen quality. The 5in 1,280x720 resolution display only covered 79.2% of the sRGB colour gamut, which isn't great even by budget smartphone standards, and is more than 6% behind the 3rd Gen Moto G. The Swift's weakest areas of coverage were reds, magentas and greens, which left colours looking rather muted and lacking in punch.

Black levels were disappointingly high at 0.57cd/m2 as well, which meant that darker areas of our test images looked a little grey at times. Admittedly, this is to be expected when the phone has such a bright screen, as our colour calibrator measured a peak white level of 551.76cd/m2. This is much brighter than the Moto G's 339.38cd/m2, and blacks looked much darker when we toned down the Swift's brightness.

A brighter screen does have its uses, though, as it means the Swift can be used more effectively under a wider variety of lighting conditions, allowing the screen to shine through clearly even in bright sunshine. The Swift also has very good viewing angles, and its contrast ratio of 961:1 means that images have plenty of detail, despite their rather skewed colour cast.

Battery Life

Of course, setting the phone's display to maximum brightness will also run down its 2,500mAh battery much faster than leaving it on auto. However, even when we set the screen brightness to 170cd/m2, the Swift showed a severe lack of stamina, only managing 8h 55m in our continuous video playback test. The Moto G's smaller 2,470mAh battery, on the other hand, lasted 11h 12m under the same conditions, making it a much more reliable handset if you've got a long day ahead.

Performance

The Swift's performance is outclassed as well, as its quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset is clocked at the standard 1.2GHz rather than 1.4GHz like the Moto G. In our benchmark results, this gave the Moto G a clear advantage, as the Swift only managed respective scores of 471 and 1,288 in the single and multicore tests of Geekbench 3 while the Moto G managed scores of 525 and 1,590.

However, the Swift has 2GB of RAM, whereas the entry-level Moto G only has 1GB (to get 2GB of RAM on the Moto G you'll have to opt for the £219 Moto Maker model). This gives the Swift a slight advantage when loading up apps, as it repeatedly beat the Moto G to the punch when we dipped in and out of our various installed programs. There's not much in it, but those who appreciate reduced loading times will probably find the Swift doesn't leave you hanging quite as often.

Web browsing, on the other hand, was a much more level playing field, despite the Moto G's marginally faster Peacekeeper score of 731 compared to the Swift's 639. Scrolling up and down complex sites like the Guardian, for instance, produced similar amounts of stutter from each handset, although the Swift was a touch jerkier when zooming in.

A faster clock speed didn't make much difference when playing games either, as the Swift actually pulled ahead of the Moto G in the offscreen Manhatten test of GFX Bench GL, finishing the test in 112 frames (around 1.8fps) compared to the Moto G's 105 frames (1.7fps). Of course, 0.1fps is hardly going to make much of a difference in day-to-day gaming, as both phones struggled to run a game of Hearthstone without choking over our character's speech bubbles and various card animations.

Even simpler games like Threes! proved a little troublesome for the Swift, as swiping round the screen to form new numbers was rather jerky. However, other games like Alphabear worked absolutely fine, so it should still be able to play most 2D games without too much trouble.

Camera

The Swift may have the edge on performance, then, but I wasn't particularly impressed with its 13-megapixel camera. Outdoor photos were either far too dark, making everything look rather dull and dingy, or too light, resulting in whited out skies. Photos were relatively detailed, though, with only the odd sign of some grainy noise reduction. I wouldn't recommend using the Swift's HDR mode, though, as this made our photos look very bleached and unnatural, adding a rather milky-looking filter across every single image.

^ Photos had a tendency to appear rather dark and dingy when shooting outdoors, and it struggled to capture any cloud detail

^ HDR mode didn't help matters either, as this made images look very washed out and unnatural

The camera app itself also isn't particularly easy to use, as the onscreen viewfinder always appears as 16:9 even if you've set it to take photos with a 4:3 aspect ratio. This makes framing your photo rather difficult, as you never know where it's going to cut off the picture. This became particularly troublesome when I moved indoors, as the top and bottom of my still life photos weren't in view on the smartphone, so I didn't know whether I had framed it correctly. 

That said, the quality of my indoor pictures was admittedly much better than those I took outside, as colours were much more natural and looked a fraction punchier than those I took on the Moto G. Likewise, the camera coped well in all lighting conditions, showing decent levels of detail regardless of whether our external lamp was turned on or off. The Moto G's pictures are a fraction sharper, but the Swift produced less noise, opting for smoother edges over grittier-looking outlines. The Swift's LED flash was also more effective than the Moto G's, but this is a rather small consolation when the Moto G performs so much better outside.  

^ Framing issues aside, colours were much more vibrant indoors and there was only a minimal amount of noise present

Conclusion

The Swift certainly has a lot of attractive features, not least its classy design, customisable OS and 16GB of storage (around 12GB of which is available to the user). However, its screen and battery life are decidedly lacklustre compared to the 3rd Gen Moto G and its camera is nowhere near as good or as easy to use. What's more, even the Swift's best features can't beat the Vodafone Smart Ultra 6 for overall value for money, as the £125 Smart Ultra 6 is both more powerful, has a better, higher resolution screen and a much longer battery life. Wileyfox's Swift is a good first effort, but it's not quite cunning enough to claim Motorola's crown.